ECOTOPE

We have spent the last 60 years of spaceflight advancing technologies that help us monitor, manage and predict planetary activities and phenomena. Today the major Earth research organizations of the world are Space agencies, studying ecosystems with powerful observation and predictive models from a great distance. This distance means we are no closer to the crucial milestone required for repairing Earth’s compromised biosphere and settling Space: being able to reproduce an ecosystem outside of its natural occurrence.

Reproducing functional, large mass ecosystems is proving to be elusive. Prior efforts based on notions of replicating Earth have failed and even recently announced proposals seem to want to go in this direction again. These heroic projects, with their large-span transparent enclosures, capture the public imagination. Perhaps they remind us of what the future was supposed to look like. Perhaps we need new imagery. Or perhaps we need a vision that isn’t a fiction.

This is ECOTOPE︎

It
directly challenges the tired paradigm of monolithic artificial ecologies -&-proposes instead: a unitized approach that grants control over connectivity and thus design.

ECOTOPE would avoid the lose-lose fates of single-volume ecosystems which either: fail, collapsing funding and public support and possibly endangering lives-or-succeed but are irreproducible due to their sheer complexity.

Researchers will treat individual modules – each hosting a biological community – as building blocks of larger, more complex landscapes. These arrays permit physical exchanges such as the passage of chemicals and colonizing organisms between modules; connections that operate like corridors found in natural ecological landscapes. Since complex networks like ecosystems are largley defined by connectivity, without a way to control connectivity, design with not be possible.

The aim is to finally allow researchers to design systems that work, without getting snagged in Earth-replication games.

ECOTOPE is in early stage development. If you are interested in supporting ECOTOPE as an investor, scientist, engineer or designer, please reach out.

ECOTOPE is a modular architecture designed to enable
the experimental study of landscape-scale ecology and expand it into Space. Researchers
will treat individual modules – each hosting a biological community – as
building blocks of larger, more complex landscapes. These “mosaics” permit physical
exchanges such as the passage of chemicals and colonizing organisms (energy) between
modules; connections that operate like corridors found in natural ecological
landscapes. Connectivity will be determined with the aid of genetic algorithms:
by changing the fitness functions driving these algorithms, researchers can
select for various functional traits including ecosystem services (e.g.
life-support, agriculture), species and community conservation, resilience to
changing conditions (e.g. climate change), or purely academic pursuits.

The module size is derived from the standard
shipping container so that it can leverage the Global Intermodal Freight
Transport System (GIFTS) – an infrastructure providing total and affordable
access to the planet’s biological communities. ECOTOPE offers a use case for amending rockets to the list of existing transport modes
(e.g. trains, boats, trucks, planes) to expand a planetary infrastructure into
an orbital one and in doing so exploit modularity to study ecological dynamics.

ECOTOPE is based
on hermetically sealed modules, each in theory a “closed ecological system”. But
whereas small-volume closed ecological systems suffer from decline due to
reduced complexity (Warner & Chesson, 1985), ECOTOPE overcomes this limitation by enabling complex landscape
construction via its modular design. In landscape and spatial ecology, the termecotope refers to the smallest
spatial unit or component of an ecological landscape. Ecotopes are considered
relatively homogeneous within themselves but can form heterogeneous and complex
landscapes when connected (Ellis, 2008), producing emergent behavior such as
gene flow, population dynamics, seed dispersal, storage effects, and pathogen
virulence (McRae et al, 2008). ECOTOPE would allow researchers to upscale modern ecological experiments so that these
large-scale phenomena can be studied for the first time under controlled
conditions.

ECOTOPE will offer the first studies of ecosystems and
heterogeneous landscapes unrestricted by scale or geographical origin and Space
access to our home biosphere, on which Space settlement will remain dependent
for decades to come. In contrast to projects like Biosphere 2 (or UAE’s recently
proposed Mars City) that staged holistic ecological research in an idealized mono-volume
replica of Earth, ECOTOPE leverages
existing infrastructure to provide the means to study and select functional
ecosystem traits through an evolvable network of smaller architectures.